Rick:

Hello, and welcome to Northwest Philly Neighbors.

I'm Rick Mohr, and my guest is author, blogger, and podcaster Lori Tharps.

Her mission is getting people to think and act differently around issues of race and color.

We follow her path from growing up in the white suburbs of Milwaukee, through finding a diverse black community in New York City, to discovering a home for her multiracial family in Mount Airy.

She keeps an upbeat style when she raises issues, which you'll hear as she talks about two of her books.

Her first, which celebrates black hair and its natural state, and shows the campaign against it.

And her recent book on colorism, where she talks about the wide range of family dynamics when people are the same race, but different colors.

Stay tuned.

I've had the pleasure of learning a lot about you, from all the things that you've written.

But not everybody who's listening will have yet.

I'm sure they will once they hear.

But your growing up experiences kind of figure strongly in how the rest of your career path has gone.

So could you maybe just talk about your growing up time a little bit, so listeners can know you a bit better?

Lori Tharps:

Sure.

So, I grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which if it's not the number one, it's always in the top five most segregated cities in America.

As a black child, I often was the only person of color in the spaces that I inhabited.

So we lived in white neighborhoods.

I went to a private school where by the time I graduated, I was the only black female in my class, my entire grade.

And there were two black guys in my grade, so that was a total of three of us.

I was a swimmer, so I was usually one of...

There was another girl who was black and Native American, so there were two brown people in the pool, but we weren't always there together, the same days or whatever.

So again, I just was always in very white spaces.

Rick:

What motivated your parents to live there?

Lori Tharps:

So, my mother was born in Mississippi, and she's one of 11 children, and her eldest sister moved to Wisconsin because her husband had found a job there.

So when she was established, her husband had said to my grandfather, my mother's father, you should come up to Wisconsin, there's really good work here.

Companies and factories are recruiting, so my mom's father got a job in Wisconsin, brought the family up, part of the great migration, and they had a really good life there.

Unlike Chicago, that was very saturated with a black movement from the south, Wisconsin, Milwaukee in particular, wasn't.

So the levels of racism and the horror stories you hear about what happened to people who like lived in very crowded tenements and things in Chicago, that was not my mother's case.

She lived on a diverse block, you know, she lived amongst white, Puerto Rican, and black.

And she experienced racism because it's America.

But for the most part, she had a very upwardly mobile experience.

You know, she went to high school that was a diverse high school, again, like black, Puerto Rican, white, you know, she was able to work.

She went to college and when she met my father, who was from North Carolina and Baltimore, they decided to stay in Milwaukee because my mother had this enormous family.

So because both of my parents were like upwardly mobile thinking, you know, they both were college educated, they were strivers and they bought a home where they could afford that was good real estate and that happened to be in the white area.

Because Milwaukee is so segregated, if you had dreams of being upwardly mobile and you had a good job and you wanted your kids to go to good schools, that was white Milwaukee.

Black areas were more impoverished, the inner city, so you couldn't be kind of upwardly mobile and find a nice black neighborhood or an integrated neighborhood for that matter at that time.

So they were of the mindset and again, I think this is what most upwardly mobile black people did in America.

I was like, you bought a home where you could, I mean, we never ever had like people tell us we couldn't live in these white neighborhoods.

We never experienced, you know, the kind of cross burnings or spray painting on the cars or you know, I've heard these stories a million times, but we never have that experience.

We were always the people who integrated a block or integrated a neighborhood and we lived in very nice neighborhoods and we did not experience anything negative.

So, from my parents' perspective, they were very, very successful and we lived in bigger and better houses as we moved and they put us in private school because they could and they believed that this was the best thing and this was so much better than what they had.

I don't think they were concerned with there are no black people around.

It was like you are getting the best of everything and if you asked me when I was 16, did I have a good childhood?

I'd be like, heck yeah, I mean, I could not complain except that there were things that would happen occasionally where I would be fully aware that I was black and nobody else was.

And that's the thing is that you start out thinking I'm on equal footing with everybody and then things fly in your face where you're like, no, I'm not.

And of course you feel different all the time.

I mean, you're always wondering, are people looking at me differently?

Am I being treated this way because I'm black or is it just...

So that's always in your mind, even when you're four, you don't have the language for it.

But by the time you're 18, you can put things together and two and two equal racism or that wasn't actually fair or those people weren't treating me equally.

But at the time, my sister, my brother and I, on paper, we had checked off all the boxes of success and I'm air quoting, figurative happiness, because everything we kind of wanted to achieve, we were able to achieve.

And people really were like, to my parents, clapped on the back, like, wow, three successful kids all got into good colleges.

My sister was a ballerina who ended up going to West Point.

We all did what we were supposed to do and maybe have some internal scars, but externally were, you know, my parents were like poster children for having successful children.

Rick:

Did you stay in touch with your mother's big extended family in the center?

Lori Tharps:

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Our family was so important.

Every holiday, you know, Fourth of July, Labor Day, Memorial Day, birthdays, that was a family gathering.

And, you know, even the few sisters who had moved away every summer, we saw our cousins.

I used to joke, I was like, I don't even know how many cousins I have.

A birthday party, like, I mean, I had some, you know, typical birthday parties, but usually a birthday party meant the family came over, which meant like 40 people singing and bringing you presents.

And that was the center of my world.

So I had this very juxtaposed experience of whiteness.

But I had this large black family, like very large, you know, I didn't have babysitters.

It was like, drop you off at random auntie's house and see you later, right?

And it could be some aunt.

I'm like, now who is this again?

How are we related to them?

But yeah, they were and continue to be such an intrinsic part of my upbringing.

You know, it makes me kind of sad that my children don't have that same experience.

But people have scattered.

So there's not that one central place anymore.

But when we do have a family gathering, I don't even care.

I'm like, if it's in Atlanta, if it's in Florida, wherever it is, we're going.

Because I just love to see my kids, you know, just get in that big family, you know, and they're like, who are these people?

I'm like, they're all your cousins.

I ignore them.

I don't introduce them.

And then, you know, in five minutes, they're talking with their cousins, right?

It's just beautiful to see.

Family is amazing.

And its family is everything to me.

Rick:

So after you went to Smith, you moved to New York, and you worked at Vibe magazine, and you wrote that that was your introduction to blackness.

Could you talk about that time a little bit?

Lori Tharps:

Sure.

So coming out of college, which I went to Smith, which was a predominantly white place again, was one of the best experiences of my life, though.

My friends were of all different ethnicities, and I really kind of found my voice and my passion for writing while I was in college.

So when I moved to New York, I actually worked in public relations for a couple of years and then went to graduate school at Columbia University.

And when I graduated from Columbia, I got my first job at Vibe, and that was kind of a joke because I do not listen to hip hop music.

It wasn't my music by any stretch of the imagination.

And I went into the interview and I said, listen, I don't know anything about hip hop music, but I'm really good journalist, and if you assign me to political stories, which Vibe was very much on the cutting edge of culture and politics, I was like, I will do those.

Just know that I can't be a resource for hip hop music.

And he hired me, which again, I thank him to this day because working at Vibe, it was like a source of black excellence.

It was the first time I had worked for an organization that was owned by black people, run by black people.

And not only that, but the black people that I met working at Vibe were truly diverse in the sense that in my experience in Milwaukee, black was defined in this one way.

And unfortunately, it was a very negative way.

Now I had my family and other outlier experiences, but I hadn't experienced personally blackness in this very diverse way.

So working at Vibe, I met black people like me who had grown up in the suburbs of whatever city.

I met black people who were vegetarians.

I met black people who were into punk music.

I met black people who were, you know, Baha'is.

I met black people who exemplified the vast diversity within the black experience.

And that gave me so much joy.

I felt like I became myself, or I was allowed to become myself and explore, you know, what could blackness look like?

And it just kind of freed me to explore the black experience, which is what I do in all of my work now.

All of my writing.

Blossom from there, that idea that blackness cannot be defined with one story.

And I kind of committed myself at that point to really use my words to amplify the narrative in America of what blackness really means.

But, you know, for myself, it was like, I needed to be okay that my black experience is as authentic as this person's or that person's, even though it doesn't look like the narrative that's kind of paraded around in American popular culture.

So I feel like Vibe gave me Entree into a much more diverse version of the black experience.

Rick:

And you met your co-author there.

Lori Tharps:

Yes, that is where I met the co-author for my first book, Hair Story, Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, Ayana Byrd.

We were both fact checkers at the time, which meant we spent a lot of time in a small room, late at night, into the early morning hours, waiting for a copy to come through for us to check.

And we were talking one night and found out we both had this interest in black hair.

I had written my master's thesis at Columbia on the politics and history and the economy of black hair.

And she had done a similar senior honors thesis when she was an undergrad on the kind of beauty ideals in America.

And it ended up being mostly about hair.

And so we were like, oh, we should write a book.

It continues to be my most successful book.

It's still in print.

We actually had a chance to update it in 2014.

It came out originally in 2001.

We've sold the movie rights to it.

I mean, and it just continuously is being used for documentaries.

And I'm actually tomorrow going to New York City to be in a British documentary about hair.

Black hair continues to spar all kinds of conversations in the arena of business, politics, social justice.

And I have continuously maintained my status as a hair historian.

So yeah, it was that job at Vibe where I met my co-author and that whole journey began.

I don't know if I would have written the book if I hadn't met Ayana, who actually is from Philadelphia and grew up in Monterey as well.

Rick:

Since I learned about your book, I've been looking around.

And I see mostly natural hairstyles, but that might be partly where I live.

But it was also pretty inspiring to look at the Amazon reviews.

Like it's one mostly young black woman after another saying, oh my God, this was so liberating for me.

How does that feel for you to see those things?

Lori Tharps:

It's really inspiring.

Of course, you write a book and you hope that it's going to touch somebody's life.

You hope it's going to make a difference.

When we have gone on book tours talking about hair story, sometimes it feels like a church revival because people testify.

People stand up and talk about how they felt so negatively about their hair, and then they read the book and understood how powerful their hair was.

Or people talk about how they internalized so many negative messages without even realizing it and read the book and realized it.

And realized that the messages they had internalized weren't their fault, that there was an actual campaign against blackness and particularly against black hair and its natural state.

To use it as an indicator of inferiority for black people, it's like, wait a second, this isn't true.

I can see the pattern here.

I can see the chronology of how this brainwashing began.

And so I can undo it, right?

And I can see the beauty in my hair.

And I can link certain patterns of thought and reverence for hair styling back to West Africa.

It's like religion.

It's like people feel that they have been given a Bible or a history of the stuff that's on their head that they probably never thought that deeply about.

So I feel great that we did that work, that it is being used in college classrooms.

People often ask, you know, did you write that book for black people or white people?

And we said, we wrote the book for everyone.

We know black people need to know their history.

And we know non-black people need to understand our history so that we as a society that is multiracial can coexist without all these misunderstandings, can coexist with a sense of pride, can coexist without demonizing one another, can coexist without people putting their hands in your hair without asking.

So I actually feel like most of my books are created in an act of service to humanity.

That is why I write.

It's why I write.

It's why I blog my American Melting Pot, my blog and my podcast of the same name.

That's what I'm doing with my words, is using my words to try to improve the condition that this society is in, particularly around issues of race and ethnicity.

But I really want to provoke people to act differently, to think differently, to believe differently.

Rick:

So Mount Airy has a lot of mixed-race families.

Was that a factor in why you moved here?

Lori Tharps:

Absolutely.

So when my husband and I left New York City, we were living in Brooklyn and we had two children.

We had a four-year-old and a one-year-old.

And we chose not to raise our family in New York because we lived in a one-bedroom apartment that we owned in a large high-rise.

And both of us, you know, we hadn't grown up that way.

I grew up in Wisconsin in houses with yards and basements.

And my husband grew up in the south of Spain, Spanish, where, you know, you could just go outside and play in the street all day long or go to the beach.

And so we just knew we didn't want to raise our kids in such an urban environment.

And so we ended up in Philadelphia because my brother lived here.

And I had actually helped him find his apartment and had been shocked by how cheap real estate was compared to New York City.

We were like, Philadelphia seems like a great choice, but then it came down to finding a neighborhood.

And we looked at Manny Young.

Somebody had told us, I mean, it was kind of a hip happening place.

People from Brooklyn really loved it.

And we went there and we're like, oh, my God, never.

Could not live here, these hills.

I thought driving, parking, snow.

No, not gonna happen.

And we just left.

And then my co-author from Hair Story, who had grown up in Mount Airy, said to me, did you look in Mount Airy?

And I said, Mount what?

I don't know what you're talking about.

She's like, you would love Mount Airy.

Go there.

Sure enough, I think by the next week, we had purchased our home.

I started reading about Mount Airy, and I read about their incredible multicultural history.

The history of how they had stopped white flight from happening, the very intentional way that they had created an integrated community, and about Allens Lane Arts Center.

I was like, this place is perfect.

How did I not hear of this?

This is my whole MO in life, is to write about multiracial experiences that work.

I'd heard of Shaker Heights, Ohio.

I'd heard about other intentionally integrated communities.

Mount Airy just was not on my radar as I'm researching it.

It's like, why is this a secret?

How come everybody's not talking about Mount Airy?

But then I was like, I don't care.

I found it.

We're moving it.

This is great.

And I'll tell you what it was that really sealed the deal.

When we came and looked at this house, we were standing on the front lawn, and a neighbor came out, and she was white, and she came out, and she said, Oh, are you thinking about buying this house?

It's so wonderful.

This block is so great.

You would love it here.

And I was looking around like, Is this real?

I've never seen a white person happily talk to a black person inviting them to be their next door neighbor.

That floored me, because growing up in Wisconsin, I did say that we'd never had negative experiences, but nobody had treated us like, Welcome!

In New York City, I had had people shut the door and tell me that the apartment was rented.

I mean, in New York, you know, diverse New York.

So my instinct is to assume white people don't want black people to live next door to them.

And if they do, if they're okay with it, they're just tolerating it.

This was such a genuine, Please, please be my neighbor.

It shocked me.

And even my husband who, you know, he saw doors shut in our faces because of my race or because we were an interracial couple.

And I felt bad because he's not even American and he had already absorbed how crazy our racial politics were.

So we were both like, this place is amazing.

So, yeah, Mount Airy was very intentional.

And when we left Brooklyn, we thought to ourselves, we're never going to be able to find such a diverse community to live in.

We're going to get trees and we're going to get a better atmosphere for our kids to like grow up in.

But we won't find diversity like Brooklyn.

But we were like, we hit the jackpot.

We did find a community where our children will not be ostracized for their race, will not feel odd as a multiracial family as well, because there were plenty of mixed race families in the area.

Not to mention, you know, there were lesbian families on our block.

There were Latino families in the area.

There was no reason that they should feel odd or out of place or ostracized because of our family makeup in Monterey.

That was very important to me, again, growing up the way I did, that they didn't experience life that way.

So, yes, other neighborhoods in Philadelphia were not the same.

Monterey really felt like something extremely special and we wanted in.

Rick:

Everything you say is true, and I love it here.

And also, it often seems to me that it's two worlds that don't interact a lot, which is maybe something more of a class thing.

Do you have thoughts about that and have you found places where those two worlds really mix?

Lori Tharps:

Well, when we moved here, there's an east boundary and a west boundary.

We were told that there was a big difference.

And then, you know, from experience, I get that these delineations can tend to be class and racially tinged.

I mean, I feel like class is that part of, you know, America that we just don't talk about, and class differences are huge.

I think we clearly need to talk about them more and understand them more.

Mount Airy is like any other place.

I mean, we do have an economic diversity as well as a racial diversity in Mount Airy.

And I think that's actually a good thing because, you know, it's the idea of like Section 8 housing.

If you have people at different classes living in the same community, one lifts the other up, you would create a better balance in society instead of putting all of the resources in one place and all the people who have nothing in another.

That makes no sense.

So I think that's a great thing about Mount Airy.

As long as we're working together, that everybody's benefiting from the wealth and the resources that are in Mount Airy, then that's what has to happen.

Rick:

You know, getting to know people from all backgrounds is a plus.

And so I just always have my eye open for places where that happens.

And one place that we've found recently is Mount Airy Baseball, because everybody joins that.

And you know, it used to be when I was growing up, you'd drop your kid off at the baseball game.

But these days, all the parents hang around and get to know each other.

Lori Tharps:

Absolutely.

And that's what I love about Mount Airy, is that there are so many places and ways Mount Airy Baseball is great.

You know, that's a great example.

My child goes to the Henry School, which is the local public school.

And there are kids there whose parents probably can afford to take European vacations.

Or one of my daughter's friends is going to Hawaii for summer break.

And there are people who their kids get free lunch, you know, everybody gets free lunch now, but who depend on free lunch and free breakfast, right?

And that happens every day in school.

And the schoolyard is full of children of multiple classes, if you will.

And I love to see now that the Henry School, it really is, you know, from top to bottom.

So my daughter, for example, is so fluent in navigating different social spaces.

You know, she's part of a Girl Scout troop that's mostly white.

She's part of a dance group that's all black.

She goes to church in a...

I guess the church is mostly white, but it's a different group of people.

Living in Mount Airy actually gave me the idea for my podcast, My American Melting Pot, that I actually made postcards and said, if you like Mount Airy, you'll love my American Melting Pot, because I used to say that if I could take the ethos of Mount Airy and turn it into like some kind of media product, that's what the world needs to see, because by no means is Mount Airy perfect.

But the way that Mount Airy was intentionally created and that you literally get to see diversity in action, like really in action and what it takes, that's what I wanted to show in my podcast.

And I'm actually going to be doing an episode on Mount Airy because I think it needs to be shown to the world, like this is what this community looks like, because it is one of these enduring narratives that integration can't happen, right?

Like all over America, we're still talking about segregation, segregated schools, and those schools are segregated because our neighborhoods are still so segregated because, well, you know America.

We just have to be segregated.

We cannot live together.

Property values drop.

Everybody knows that homes owned by black people are not as valuable, and Mount Airy defies all of those stereotypes and narratives, and I really sometimes just want to be like, it doesn't have to be that way, America.

And again, not because Mount Airy is perfect.

It's not like we live in this utopia, but it's so different than the narrative of what American neighborhoods have to look like.

We have a public school that works.

We have a public school that's integrated.

It really is at this point.

We have a food co-op that has, again, healthy food, and it's accessible to people with money and who have limited means.

We have an amazing library.

We have a grocery store.

We have restaurants.

We have the things that people say do not exist, cannot exist.

Our property values are so stable, they defy even the recession of 2008, right?

So this is what I want to talk about.

This is why I created my podcast, because if we listen to the mainstream narrative of what is wrong with America, about how race works in America, about the problems with America, then you would believe we were doomed.

I want to talk about the ways that the diversity works, because I really believe that the mainstream media has an agenda to invoke fear, because fear sells.

I have to tune in if I'm afraid.

Got to know what's happening.

I'm not talking about sharing good news all the time at the sake of like, oh, we just won't mention that the climate is, we're going to die.

No.

But if you had a media outlet that was actually interested in sharing the way that I think is going to save the world, diversity in action, if you could talk about the issues of race and diversity and inclusion and multiculturalism and people of different racial backgrounds doing amazing things and working together, we would have a different perspective of what was possible.

And that's what I try to do and wanted to do and why I started the podcast, to have my voice amplified even more.

And it's not just my voice, I'm bringing in a lot of different guests to talk about these types of topics and issues because I live in a neighborhood where I see it happening and you can almost forget how unique this is.

I don't want people to forget, I want people to know and to be aware and I'm trying to bring that to the airwaves every other Friday just to get people to realize that this is possible on a very positive level.

Rick:

Go team!

So you wrote this book about colorism.

Would you like to talk about that a little bit?

Lori Tharps:

Sure.

So I wrote the book Same Family Different Colors.

Again, it started out from my blog, My American Melting Pot.

I wrote several times about all the kind of crazy things that happened to me as a black mom of three children who have three different skin tones.

And things like being mistaken for my kid's nanny.

All three of my children were born very pale with straight black hair.

My daughter, my youngest child, she particularly is really pale skin, really straight black hair.

My boys were born with curlier black hair.

I mean, they were born straight black hair, but it curled up pretty quickly.

But her hair stayed very straight for a long time.

And people literally thought she was Asian.

I literally was asked if I had adopted her from China.

So I would write these little vignettes on my blog, and I would get so many responses where other people are like, me too, and Indian women, white women who married people of color, they were asked if they were the babysitter.

People just could not figure out how these people were family.

Rick:

Could I ask you a quick question about that humiliating experience of being mistaken for the nanny?

Did you come up with any half-smile responses that got it across to the person and kind of made the light bulb go on for them?

Because it seems like such a challenging situation.

Lori Tharps:

Only after the fact.

No matter how many times it happened, it still caught me by surprise.

It doesn't seem that offensive to people until it happens to you, because it's like this creature came out of my womb, right?

The bond between us is so obvious to me.

The fact that you don't see it is shocking.

Even though I know it makes sense that you don't necessarily see my child, she looks white, right?

She does not look black.

But the fact that I'm breastfeeding her or that I'm holding her this way, you don't imagine as you're pregnant, wow, I'm gonna have to prep myself for all the times I'm mistaken for the nanny.

You're not prepped for that.

You're just like, I'm gonna have a baby and I hope I change their diapers properly, right?

And then having to say, I'm this child's mother.

You're not prepared for people not to see you for who you are and then have to tell them.

It's awkward, it's embarrassing.

You're gonna embarrass them.

There's just no comfortable way to say it.

When people say it to you over and over again though, then you just get angry because you've said it so many times.

Now it's not to the same person, obviously, but I was at a music class here in Mount Airy, you know, toddler music class, you take your kids, and this woman was like insistent that my child did not look like me to the point where she suggested I go get a DNA test because they make mistakes in the hospital.

And she thought she was being helpful, I think.

But it hurts so much.

It hurts so much not to be seen as who you are.

But I was realizing that all these people had so many similar stories, and these stories were resonating.

I mean, these were the stories that I was getting, you know, dozens of comments.

So I said to my writing group, I said, do you guys think anyone would read a book about having family, like same race, but different colors, like talking about?

And they were like, yes.

And these women were all white.

I wanted to ask kind of like a neutral audience, not just people who would get it.

And they all said yes.

And then I did talk to some families who were transracial adoption families, and I said, it's not about adoption, but they were still like, yes.

So I said, okay, I'm gonna research this idea of how does it affect family dynamics when people are the same race but different colors?

Because I know that it's not just interracial families where you get people that skin tones are different.

In African American families, in Latino families, in Asian American families, what happens?

I wanted to know this as a parent.

This is how most of my books start.

I have a question.

I want it answered.

I want to be able to ask people questions, just butt into their lives and ask my questions and not be seen as rude.

So I'm like, I'm writing about it.

So I said, I'm gonna write that book.

I'm gonna just try to get that question answered.

And it ended up being a book about colorism because that's what we're talking about is if your child is darker than you, if your child is lighter than you, if your husband is darker than you, if your wife is lighter than you, how does the idea of colorism, how we perceive and treat people of different colors, how does that manifest in the family unit?

And again, because I had a son who was darker, a son who was lighter, and then a daughter who looked Asian or white, my parenting had to change based on each child.

So I started the book soon after Trayvon Martin's killer had been acquitted, and everybody's talking about the talk, about how we need to talk to our black sons to be prepared to deal with a world that will literally shoot them dead and not care.

And I had a son who looks black and I have a son who doesn't look...

I mean, if you know what black people look like, you might realize that he's black, but to the average person, he's got very pale skin, loosely curled hair.

So it started out with this, do I give both my boys the talk?

Do I only give one?

And then how do I reconcile that one is a target and the other one gets to just kind of be in the world?

If I do that, won't that make my two boys hate each other or one feel guilty, one feel envious?

All of that was going through my head as a parent.

So this question wasn't just what do you say to the outside world?

It was how do you parent your children individually when racially they look different?

And then as I started doing research, I realized that sometimes it was between mom and dad.

Both people are African American or both people are Latino or both people are Asian, but one parent is lighter than the other.

And then that causes them to feel different ways about each other, you know, leads to divorce in some cases, leads to drug or alcohol addiction in some places because there's such a sense of inferiority, leads to preferential treatment to the child that looks darker or lighter.

And it can go either way.

I wanted to be very clear that when we talk about skin color differences, people assume that it's the darker person, whether it's the child, the mother, the sister, the brother, it's the darker person that will feel worse or will get worse treatment.

That wasn't always the case.

There is no, this is what always happens.

And that's what I found in the book.

Sometimes the lighter child is treated worse because they seem like the enemy, right?

They're like the white man.

And so they represent privilege.

And it's even in the family, they are treated poorly.

Sometimes the lighter child feels isolated because everybody else in the family looks darker and they're all connected and they stand out.

There was every kind of response.

And what I did was try to go back in time and figure out when in each individual cultural group did color become meaningful.

So going all the way back to pre-slavery in the United States, looking at African Americans and when color became important, looking in colonial Latin America, how did the Spaniards impose like a color cast system in Latin America and the Caribbean, looking in East Asia and when color became an indicator of class status, nothing to do with white people, nothing to do with colonialism, but looking at when in Japan and Korea and China, if you were of a lower class, peasant class, you're working in the fields and you would get darker, darker skin meant peasant.

And to this day, that idea is still in play, that darker skin means low class, plain and simple.

So really had to explain that first, because otherwise it sounds like people are just crazy and petty if they're talking about color, right?

It seems, why would you treat your child this way?

Why would you treat your husband this way over something as arbitrary as like their skin shade is one shade darker or one shade lighter?

You have to understand the history to understand these individual stories that I'm telling in the book.

So each chapter dives into a history and then dives into contemporary stories of families.

And again, those stories range from, we were all like different shades, didn't matter at all, to stories of people ending up in prison because the darker child was demonized and the lighter child was given a free pass to be whatever he could be.

Same parents, you know, like no difference.

And I continue to get stories, like every time I do a talk, I did a video series to accompany the book.

And like there's a billion stories of people experiencing the world differently, starting in the home because of the shade of their skin, which is just another, you know, narrative that we need to explore when we talk about race, because what we really need to be talking about is color, because people treat you the way you look.

And if you look white, you're treated white.

If you look dark, you know, there's a story of a darker skinned Southeast Asian man in Mississippi who was beaten within an inch of his life because some white people thought he was a Negro.

You know, it's plain and simple.

So sometimes talking about race is not enough, and we need to be talking about color, because at the end of the day, we're a visual species, and we treat people color coupled with hair texture, with features, that kind of thing.

And like I said, my work as a writer, as a journalist, as a storyteller, is to expand our conversations about race and diversity so we can do better.

You can't do better if you're ignoring this ginormous elephant in the room, which is if you're trying to talk about equality and diversity, you have to acknowledge the fact that certain people within a racial group might be experiencing access and privilege more so than others because of the literal color of their skin, not just because they're black.

And yeah, those are the conversations that we need to really be having.

Rick:

I was struck by your feeling after talking to so many people that at the base, much of it was people's desire for belonging.

Lori Tharps:

Absolutely.

That's like the main conclusion that I came to is that at the end of the day, everybody wants to belong, to be seen as part of something, right?

Not many people want to be lone wolves, lone wolves.

So one woman was saying that her daughter was very light and is African American, but she has loosely curled hair and people often don't recognize her as black.

And she and her mom are activists and they have dedicated their life to improving the lives of black people in the black community.

And she said there's nothing more painful than not being seen as black, particularly when your whole life is about making the world a better place for black people.

And that is really painful.

It's painful because black people themselves don't look at her and see blackness, but then also non-black people don't see.

So again, it's like feeling like you're not part of your own family.

I had one interview with a Mexican man who was very pale with red hair and he said like he does things like exaggerate his accent.

He holds the family stories very close to the vest and is always the one to remind everybody so much because people think he's Scottish.

People think he's Irish.

They think he's a Viking, but they never think he's Mexican.

Even with his strong Mexican accent, he is not seen as Mexican.

And if that's what you are, you're not seen.

And everybody wants to be seen and understood and not have to say actually, no, I'm not Scottish.

I'm Mexican.

I think, and I'm not sure, I'm making a supposition that we, majority of people look like the group that they belong to.

So it's hard to understand that feeling of going through life ambiguous.

I think we can all understand that ambiguity is not comfortable.

And again, that's another narrative that we do need to talk about because we are becoming a browner society, a more mixed society.

We need to talk about being mixed or multiracial as its own unique identity.

And the reality is that we have mixed multiracial people in history from every culture, and we need to recognize their place in history so that it doesn't feel like I'm a nothing, I'm a mutt, like I hate that.

Being mixed and multiracial, you're a combination of like multiple things, and we can talk about that, but we want to simplify race.

It doesn't work.

Yeah, so that's my American melting pot, right?

That's why I keep talking about it.

Rick:

Yeah.

So you're also a professor.

What's your favorite class to teach?

Lori Tharps:

I've been very lucky.

I've been at Temple teaching in the journalism department for almost 10 years now.

I was originally hired to teach magazine courses, and so I've taught every magazine class, you know, magazine writing, magazine editing, introduction to magazines, and we have a capstone class where students actually just make their own magazine.

And I love teaching all those classes, because I love magazines.

I just love the tactile feel of magazines, and I just love the storytelling you can do in magazines and the images, which is why I have a blog.

It's like my version of my own magazine.

But, I mean, that's kind of like skill.

But in terms of content, I've wanted to branch out a bit, and so over the years, I've had the opportunity to create my own class, that class I love, because I see myself as a storyteller, and I'm a voracious reader, and I love fiction.

I like writing fiction as well.

I wrote one novel called Substitute Me, and enjoyed that very, very much.

I became a journalist because it was a writer with a job.

Like, that was my thing.

I was like, I'm gonna just do this to get paid to be a writer, but I'm gonna write novels, and not giving up on that as the end result, right?

So I teach a class that I created called Ripped From the Headlines, using journalism skills to write fiction.

And it is a very popular class.

It fills all the time.

And basically, I teach students to use their journalism skills to write fiction.

But I also have really tried to emphasize why fiction can be a more effective way of getting people to care about real issues.

Sometimes you can write a story about the immigrant experience and make people see humans are immigrants, not this thing called an immigrant, right?

We can humanize some of these very difficult concepts that maybe people's eyes glaze over after X amount of stories about the war in Syria.

But you could write a novel or a short story about the war in Syria from the perspective of a five-year-old girl, right?

Or a physician or whatever.

The goal is to both give students an opportunity to write creatively, but also to understand that their job as journalists could be also done with fiction.

In the sense that we are journalists trying to give voice to the voiceless, trying to affect change in the world, that fiction can be used in that way too.

So that's the class that I created, but it's also the class that I think I enjoy the most.

As a closeted novelist, that's something that I just really love doing.

Rick:

I'd like to take that class.

Lori Tharps:

People always say that.

I have had quite a few non-traditional students take the class with me, and it's been great.

Rick:

So what projects do you have coming up?

What are you excited about?

Brewing?

Lori Tharps:

We're going to Spain actually for a project for me, even though my husband's from Spain.

So my memoir came out in 2009, it was called Kinky Gazpacho, and it was about my kind of, it was a racial coming of age story.

I had really romanticized Spain growing up, and I thought I'm going to go to Spain and have this fabulous life, and I only thought that because I took Spanish in 5th grade, you know, 5th through high school, and never been to Spain, didn't look at the racial politics there.

It wasn't that great.

Let's say political correctness had not made it to Spain, and they were not very aware of what, anything about black culture.

And so it was kind of challenging for me to be there, because people would stare at me or point at me.

I wrote the book about kind of coming to terms with what it meant to be black in Spain.

And I ended the book finding out that Spain had a hidden black history, that they had African slaves there for hundreds of years.

And so I was like, wait a minute, this country does have a connection to blackness, but it's just been erased.

So what I'm doing this summer is I'm going back to kind of re-investigate what it means to be black in Spain 10 years after I did Kinky Gazpacho.

There's this kind of newfound enthusiasm about uncovering that black history, academics in Spain, filmmakers, dancers, singers.

There's all kinds of interest.

And there's a significant enough amount of black American expats.

There's a, it's called Las Morenas de España.

It's a group of black women who like meet regularly for brunch and stuff in all these different cities in Spain because they live there.

So I'm going to do an actual radio documentary about what it's like to be black in Spain 10 years after the book came out.

So you can tune in and hear it on my American Melting Podcast at the end of the summer, beginning of the fall.

And that's what I'm very excited about because yeah, podcasting, it's so cool, isn't it?

Rick:

Well, Lori, thank you so much for sharing your stories.

Lori Tharps:

Thank you for having me.

Rick:

And insights.

Lori Tharps:

It's been a great conversation.

Rick:

Yeah, we could go for a couple more hours.

Lori Tharps:

Absolutely.

Rick:

Be sure to check out Lori's blog and podcast at myamericanmeltingpot.com.

There's a link in the show notes, along with some of her books and articles, and they're also on our website, nwphillipodcast.net.

If you like the show, please subscribe and tell your friends.

And if you want to hear about new episodes every two weeks, just hit the like button on our Facebook page.

I'm Rick Mohr.

Thanks for listening.

See you next time for more stories from Northwest Philly Neighbors.